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“Autonomy is hard for some people to understand. It is only possible to understand when you don’t have it.”
–Anonymous UC Berkeley student, circa 1969. (Quoted in Right On: A Documentary of Student Protest, by Maryl Levine and John Naisbitt.)
“Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions can become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm used to say that racism was like a Cadillac, they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner’s manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop a civil rights vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality.”
— George Lipsitz, “Libraries and Memories: Beyond White Privilege 101.”
Via Jill at Feministe:
“Thus I have at a comparatively early age lost all my motivating faiths, faith in the righteous cause of women, faith in the recreating powers of science, faith in the ennobling possibilities of education. This is indeed a very sad state. Worse, I have become that futile creature, a writer. I had rather make small black marks on paper than go through any experience I can name. The sensory pleasures have pretty largely ceased to be; I can sit here in my quiet study and desire to desire something, something to touch or taste or see or hear, but the desire does not come. If I were building a Utopia, I would take away our memories, so we would start fresh every day, and then I would endow each of us with strong, lusty desires, and I would give us strong, eager feet with which to run swiftly and determinedly after our desires. I would leave principles out of my Utopia, even feminism; in place of principles I would give us all a magnificent and flaming audacity.”
–Lorine Livingston Pruette, circa 1926.
From Clay Shirky’s new blogpost Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:
That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.
There aren’t many writers pithier than Clay.
Today is Dr. Seuss’s 105th. I went looking this morning for a quote of his on activism — not something from one of his books — but apparently I’m misremembering it, because Google turns up nothing. So I’ll settle for this one:
Look what we found
in the park
in the dark.
We will take him home.
We will call him Clark.
He will live at our house.
He will grow and grow.
Will our mother like this?
We don’t know.
I’ve always thought that kind of summed up the craft of historical research.
Feel free to pass along your favorite Seuss quotes (or books!) in comments.
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